All posts made in Feb. 2000:

In the latest episode of my quest to play Imogen, I tried pcBBC - an emulator which is time limited, not feature limited. Nice, but it doesn't read .inf files without a converter (and that comes with the registered version only).

"The Japanese ear is remarkably impervious to automobile horns," according to Anatomy of the Japanese (part of the How To Japanese CDROM. Apparently learning how to be Japanese doesn't include learning the basics of grammar then).

There are archives chock full of software, most of which is stored in two files: the data, and the header bytes. These .inf files are either loaded by the emulator, or in Horizon's case you use a file to append these bytes to the beginning of the data.

Today is Sunday, which means roast (see my Roast Dinner HOWTO). We went to a different Sainsbury's to get the food, just to make a change. Strange aisle layout, food in odd places, sausagemeat in the frozen foods (of all places!). So much for the legendary adaptability of humankind. It was like being in a parallel universe.

Punctuation is a mark of lazy writing. I've got this kind of gut feeling that using italics, bold, ellipsis, exclamation marks in your writing is lazy. It's kind of like screaming obscenities in an argument because you can't articulate yourself. Also like marking up documents in MS Word, or something similar. If you want to make it look good, use Quark - if not then your document should be just as good in plain ASCII (or should that be Unicode?). It's like: if you can't get across what you're trying to say using only plain ASCII then you're not saying it right. I'm as guilty as the next person, but I wish I wasn't.

I wonder if anyone else does this: I'm using this log to store good looking links that I want to come back to and check more in depth later. I imagine other people are a lot more discerning and only publish links that are actually really good. Not me.

Fantastic! I didn't realise that XSLT is now a W3C Recommendation. I'm convinced that XSL Transforms are the way of the future: imagine an xSQL database natively giving XML output, and then the server applying the transforms based on the client (into WML, HTML, whatever). Okay okay XSLT is supposed to be client-side, but for moving data around it's going to make life so much easier!

Another classic: there and loads and loads of great sites about The Mysterious Cities of Gold, but for some reason none of them have the MP3 of the theme tune that this flat was listening to only a fortnight ago. It has a long intro, no voiceover, and is pretty good quality. But where is it now? Who knows.

The BBC have finally posted the story about the Japanese standed killer whale, complete with postage-stamp sized RealVideo report. Apparently the local aquarium is trying to figure out what to do. Well, as long as they don't blow it up.

Actually, Weaving The Web really is a brilliant book. Knowing the history and rationale makes so many things clear, and the book reads more like a manifesto for the future of the WWW. His ideas about machine information flow are only just now being realised, and I think his more radical ideas about restricting ownership of domains (to one per individual/corporation) should be considered more seriously. He appears to have a very modern slightly left-wing social/ethical responsibility. I like that.

Sudden realisation: oh, that's all weblogs are. Places to put links to keep them for later (and a journal sort of mixed in). Well, in that case why aren't they better organised? Links should automatically be added to a searchable directory, surely. I should get to work on my perpetually-tomorrow Mars portal and use it to store the rest of my links too.

I understand weblogs are supposed to have a kind of scope or business plan or something. Well this isn't a weblog, and that's why it's okay for me to put handy links here to keep for later - like how back buttons work.

The question remains: what sort of site is this anyway? (or - what sort of site is this going to be, since there isn't any content.) I don't think it's a weblog since I don't really browse enough to generate fresh links. Anyway, I don't want to be a weblog. I look at the sort of places listed at Blogger's list o' blogs and on Weblogs.com and it just terrifies me. So many people, all with their own lives. All different. All just as complex and just as valid as I am. Ceci n'est pas un weblog.

I'm going to use Blogger to manage this page. I wonder if this is the same first post that everybody makes?

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The 8 most recent posts are titled
Books read March 2015, Filtered for rules and otters, Filtered for Monday mornings, Coffee morning and the business onion, Filtered for capital, Let's do coffee morning 7, A Richter scale for outages, and Filtered for change.
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